


What a clock measures

by Beleriandings



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Caleb's time in the asylum, Drugs, Gen, Stream-of-consciousness-ish?, Time - Freeform, institutionalisation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 10:04:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18466729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: There is a clock here, an old one with a cracked enamel face high on the wall, out of reach. Everything is out of reach here: the clock, and the window, which is small and barred and higher than he can stretch even if he stands up on his narrow bed.The clock is broken. It stopped long before Bren was put here, its hands forever frozen at thirteen minutes past nine.





	What a clock measures

**Author's Note:**

> “Zeit ist das, was man an der Uhr abliest” - ”Time is what a clock measures” (A. Einstein, 1916, Relativity.)
> 
> A short fic about Caleb, his years in the asylum, and time. Recommended musical accompaniment: Walzer für Niemand by Sophie Hunger, because Liam’s Spotify playlist for Caleb is Very Good and gives me fic inspiration.

It is dark here, or sometimes it is bright. His memories of the place, when he tries to grasp at them later, don’t stay in place. He’s never experienced that before, this blurring together of time, and it bothers him.

Time, for Bren Aldric Ermendrud, has always been a straight line, days demarcated neatly by check-marks like the scale on a map, neat and precise, the chiming of the clock embedded in his mind.

There is a clock here, an old one with a cracked enamel face high on the wall, out of reach. Everything is out of reach here: the clock, and the window, which is small and barred and higher than he can stretch even if he stands up on his narrow bed.

The clock is broken. It stopped long before Bren was put here, its hands forever frozen at thirteen minutes past nine. 

He wonders if it stopped at that time in the morning or the evening. It seems to matter, very much more than it should. There is nothing else to occupy his mind, nothing else to distract from the aching, fearful darkness, the knowledge of what he’s done. 

Or, there is that, and there are the times when the guards come, flanking a doctor in a white robe. He’s afraid of them: he cannot look into their eyes.

They force him to drink something, sometimes; a drink that tastes like iron and herbs, and when they force him to swallow down a whole cup of it, he feels dizziness wash over him, drowsy and barely half there. He feels the strength and focus needed to do magic ebb out of him, like water from a cracked jar. 

He’ll awake, hours later, or so he assumes by the time of day. He doesn’t know how long he’s been asleep; he barely remembers going to sleep, only feeling weak, and falling, and losing his grip on the passing of time.

The light from the window is all he has: it’s a second clock, shining in and receding in counterpoint to the broken one, moving where it is still.

At first, Bren counts the days, or at least those that he experiences. He doesn’t know exactly when he started, and he doesn’t know how many he has missed, so he’s sure there’s a margin of error: initially, when he came here, he was extremely hazy, the world a swirl of darkness and pain and the jangling discordance of some spell that his mind was fighting against, that was grating around inside like broken glass in a wound. 

It reminds him of when he was very young; he used to get sick sometimes in the winter, and once he must have had a very high fever. He remembers his mother sitting up all night with him through the fractured fever dreams. Her cool hand on his burning forehead, singing a song as dreamed of strange things that sometimes woke him up sobbing, fire in the night. 

He shuts those memories out.

Besides, the sensation fades after a time. He likes the moments when it’s just faded enough that he is lucid, but there is still time before they come back to give him his next dose. When he has that awareness, he uses the time to count things. 

Bren always loved to count things, as a child. Clouds and birds passing overhead, or cows being lead out to pasture. Later, the carriages passing outside his window at the Academy, a special extra total of the red ones. He counted the ink bottles and pen nibs that he went through, the standard ones that the school provided and the ones that came from the special supply cupboard at his master’s house. He had counted seconds, counted out hours of sleep like a precious resource those last weeks, as he desperately prepared for the final test.

They hadn’t known exactly what it would be, then.

 _To count_ , Bren thinks as he stared at the familiar cracks in the plaster ceiling, (which he’s counted many times; there are fourteen, though several of them are so branched that it takes some amount of subjectivity to decide where one ends and a new one begins), _to count,_ _one needs a place to start from_. 

Usually, it’s sensible to start from zero. Certainly when one is counting things, that makes sense. When one is counting the time though, or the date, that isn’t quite so clear to him. He doesn’t know how long has passed in the time before he was brought here. _  
_

_He remembers -_

He remembers darkness and fire, his eyes nightblind from staring directly into it, watering from the heat. Something fearful and expansive unfolding within him, overturning in his chest. An irreversible realisation, a moment that can never be undone. He remembers falling to his knees at some point, a scream tearing its way out of his mouth as he heard _their_ screams, in his head, blocking out all else.

He remembers someone clasping his upper arms, so tightly it hurts, pulling him to his feet. The taste of vomit at the back of his throat, acrid and burning, always burning. A stinging slap, as if someone struck him in the face. Someone shouting in his ear, too loud, too close, though he can’t parse what they’re saying. 

He remembers - very vaguely - being brought here, his arms tied behind his back. He knows he was tied to the bed at first; he barely remembers that part, and early on he has welts on his wrists, fresher than the other scars on his skin, so he supposes it must have happened. 

The reality of the things he remembers is not a given, anymore.

Soon the marks fade though, and all he has to rely on is the light from the window, the ins and outs of the doctors and the guards, to measure time passing.

He starts counting days from the date of the fire, because it’s the last date he remembers - really _remembers_ \- it being. It’s the last date that matters. It’s hard to imagine there being other dates, in here.

He starts counting time from thirteen minutes past nine, because it’s always that time, in here. _Time is real only because we say it is_ ; he remembers reading that in a book once. Yet for Bren it’s always been an extremely compelling illusion, and he should know: he’s seen a few.

He doesn’t lose count of the days at first, not for at least a year.

(Barring an unknown margin of error, for those first days. Also the lost time, when the medicine they give him knocks him out entirely.)

(There might, for all he knows, be quite a lot of lost time. He tries not to think about that too much.)

One day it’s his birthday, by his calculation. Bren would be eighteen, today. Nothing is different, of course: birthdays are a thing of the world outside, and there’s no time here. No official time, anyway, only his count of the days.

(In another life, he finds himself thinking, he and Astrid and Eodwulf are sharing a birthday cake, in one of their rooms. Or maybe he’s at home, with his father laying a proud, heavy hand on his shoulder, his mother hugging him tightly, giving him a kiss on the cheek.)

He remembers counting his eighteenth birthday, and his nineteenth. By his twenty-two, he’s lost count of the days entirely. The errors should be additive, but they _feel_ multiplicative, or even exponential. He’s always doubted his count anyway: it was flawed from the beginning, because he was counting from the fire, not the date they put him in here. There’s time missing.

It bothers him. He doesn’t know exactly, but he’s probably twenty-four when he works out a solution. Perhaps, he concludes, there was only ever one day, repeating again and again as the slatted light from the barred window slips across the wall. Or perhaps one year, as its position changes with the warm and the cold weather. That would also make sense.

If he could reach, and he had something to draw on the plaster with, he could make a sundial. He imagines it sometimes: in his head, it’s like the ones on the outer wall of the Soltryce Academy and the city hall in Rexxentrum, except his would not be brass inlay and bright ceramic tile in the colours of the heavens, but scratches on the wall, in the cracked and yellowing plaster. But it would do. Or, he could make a moondial: those are harder, but he has learned to tell the light of the two moons from each other. All farm children, anyone who has spent time looking up at the vast sky above and breathing outside air, knows the slightly warmer yellower glow of the larger moon from the silver, softer luminescence of the smaller.

But in any case, Bren has nothing to write with. He wonders if he would even remember how to write, if he tried. He wonders if he’d remember how to read: he misses books, misses the smell of them and the texture of the pages, misses the brightness of possibility and the things he learned, a whole world of magic to discover, to understand, to master.

That was what got him here, he thinks. Magic, the fire rising up out of the words and gushing from his hands and consuming all. He can’t cast it if he tries, and he has tried; he has no components, no focus, and besides, that liquid they force him to drink saps the magical power from him. And anyway, he doesn’t deserve it. Not anymore. 

But he wants it, is the thing. He craves it like a starving man. His mind is starving, addled by loneliness and pain. Sometimes the pain seems too much to live through, and he’s ready to let it take him. He doesn’t particularly want to live, after all.

But to die would be too much a mercy for someone like him: he doesn’t get that, and that’s as it should be. 

(It’s more like a prison, Bren thinks, than a place of recovery. That’s fine though; he _should_ be in prison, for what he’s done. He should be kept away from the world.)

Several times - more for something to do, an experiment to make, than for the sake of any real rebellion - he tries to refuse the drink they bring him when they bring his meals, the one they stay to watch him drink until they’re sure he’s finished every drop. The first time, he drops the cup to the floor. They have a guard hold him too tight, while they get another. 

He drops it to the floor again, and earns a stinging slap, that makes blood run down his face from his nose, blooming bright red against the off-white of the clothes they make him wear. The next time, one guard wrenches his arm back with an expressionless face, the other pinching his nose and pouring the liquid in, not stopping even when he splutters and chokes on it. Not until he swallows it.

One day, he tries to force himself to vomit it up afterwards in the chamberpot in his room: immediately, three guards rush in, and one doctor who casts a spell on him, bleeding the strength from his limbs until his vision greys and he falls into darkness. When he awakes again it’s many hours later: the sky outside is cloudy so he can’t see the position of the sun, but the light is a dark blue, fading into night. He licks his dry lips and tastes metal and herbs there, and he feels the weakness in his limbs, so he knows that his plan failed. 

(He doesn’t blame the guards, or even the doctors. He hates them, but he does not blame them. He knows those faces they wear, blank and neutral. They are acting on orders. He remembers how that feels.)

There’s something in his head. This, he knows with a certainty. There’s something in his head still, grating and choking his memories, fogging them in places when he looks back. He notices it more and more, now that his mind is turned inwards most of the time, and sifting endlessly through memories sharp as broken glass is all he has to do. The closer he looks at them, the more he thinks there’s something wrong.

Everything’s wrong, though. This was not how his life was supposed to go. He was supposed to go far. He was supposed to serve the empire. He had been so sure.

(He still isn’t sure, if he were to do it over, whether he would break again. He supposes it is a meaningless question: time, after all, only flows one way, a rhythm that only appears to bend and slow to a fluid, stretching halt in this place.)

He is being kept alive, he knows. For what? That, he doesn’t know. His eyes slip across the symbol of the Cerberus Assembly’s own dedicated security on the guards’ armour, and he shudders; he doesn’t _want_ to know, he thinks. Sometimes he wonders if it would be better if they did leave him alone here forever. 

Bren begins to think, on occasion, about the slatted bars of sunlight moving in the other direction. If there really is only one day, he thinks, and it is repeated over and over, then why does it go in one direction, rather than the other? What’s to stop it going the other way? Sometimes, in his dreams, it does. After a while, he doesn’t know what is a dream, and what isn’t. 

That’s how they want it. This place has the guise of a hospital, a place where the sick are treated. But it is not that, he begins to see. It’s a prison, a place where people can disappear to. 

Bren can’t disappear. He _should_ disappear, for what he’s done, but he does not want to. He wants time to make sense again, before he dies. He wants to put it all right. 

(It’s selfish, he thinks, to still want things after what he’s done. But he does. He’s not a good person, after all.)

He wants to make it right, even if that’s impossible. He watches the sunlight slip across the walls, feeling the weakness in his limbs, the nausea and dizziness that wracks him each time he tries to slip into the frame of mind required to cast spells. The sunlight’s motion is inexorable, repetitive. 

Sometimes, he dreams that it’s going the other way. 

Sometimes, the notion stays in the back of his mind when he wakes.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Einstein's book Relativity, because of just like... who I am as a person, I guess. (I'm a physics PhD student, in my ordinary life/day job :P) ....Which, by the way, is a very good book: it's popular science, basically, intended to explain his ideas in like 150 pages, in a way that's accessible to members of the general public with no scientific background. The language barely feels dated at all, there's no maths, and it's very very good, so that's my book rec of the day!
> 
> Anyway, before I go off on a weird tangent, I hope you liked this fic! I feel like there's a lot more going on with this situation than Caleb either knows or is able to talk about as per canon so far, and I can't wait until Matt and/or Liam gives us more detail. But I know when that happens I will also Die From Feelings...my BOY....... ;___;


End file.
